I was working on an entirely different column about entrepreneurship and state tax policy when I read another Forbes contributor (Steve Zwick) this morning suggesting my house should be allowed to burn down in response to my global warming views.

We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.

They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?

I will suggest a counter-proposal at the end of this article, but I think it is worth reading his entire article. It really gives a good idea of just why the climate debate is broken. The ratio of ad hominem attacks to actual thoughtful discussion of science is just amazing, and the implicit assumption that there are no people of goodwill on the other side of the debate is both wrong and dangerous. I invite you to compare the tone, content, and tenor of his articles on climate with mine on this site. There have been five: Here, here, here, here and this one you are reading. The first two try to pin down where skeptics do and don’t agree with the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change. The other three, including this one, have been lamentations on why the discourse around climate is so unproductive.

In a written statement, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, and vocal advocate of catastrophic man-made global warming theory, has admitted to obtaining certain Heartland Institute internal documents under false premises, and then forwarding these documents to bloggers who were eager to publish them.

Gleick (also a writer on these pages at Forbes) frequently styles himself a defender of scientific integrity (for example), generally equating any criticism of his work or scientific positions with lack of integrity (the logic being that since certain scientists like himself have declared the science to be settled beyond question, laymen or even other scientists who dispute them must be ethically-challenged).

In equating disagreement with lack of integrity, he offers a prime example of what is broken in the climate debate, with folks on both sides working from an assumption that their opponents have deeply flawed, even evil motives. Gleick frequently led the charge to shift the debate away from science, which he claimed was settled and unassailable, to the funding and motives of his critics. Note that with this action, Gleick has essentially said that the way to get a more rational debate on climate, which he often says is his number one goal, was not to simplify or better present the scientific arguments but to steal and publish details on a think tank’s donors.

It looks increasingly like the Heartland Institute strategy document that is making gleeful rounds of climate alarm blogs is a fake — Heartland claims it is such, and details about the document and its metadata seem to confirm this. But just because a document is fake does not mean there is not a lot to learn from it, both about its authors and the reaction of those who received it. I want to offer two bits of learning from this episode.

The myth and reality of climate skeptics

One reason I am fairly certain the document is fake is this line from the supposed skeptic strategy document:

His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

Likely you have heard the sound bite that “97% of climate scientists” accept the global warming “consensus”. Which is what gives global warming advocates the confidence to call climate skeptics “deniers,” hoping to evoke a parallel with “Holocaust Deniers,” a case where most of us would agree that a small group are denying a well-accepted reality. So why do these “deniers” stand athwart of the 97%? Is it just politics? Oil money? Perversity? Ignorance?

We are going to cover a lot of ground, but let me start with a hint.

In the early 1980′s I saw Ayn Rand speak at Northeastern University. In the Q&A period afterwards, a woman asked Ms. Rand, “Why don’t you believe in housewives?” And Ms. Rand responded, “I did not know housewives were a matter of belief.” In this snarky way, Ms. Rand was telling the questioner that she had not been given a valid proposition to which she could agree or disagree. What the questioner likely should have asked was, “Do you believe that being a housewife is a morally valid pursuit for a woman.” That would have been an interesting question (and one that Rand wrote about a number of times).

One of the hot topics, so to speak, in the global warming debate is allocating responsibility for 20th century warming between natural and man-made effects. This is harder than one might imagine — after all, no one’s thermometer has two readings, one for “natural” and one for “man-made.” This week, from CERN in Geneva, comes an important new study in this debate.

Global warming skeptics argue that only a portion, possibly a small portion, of recent warming is due to man-made CO2 and greenhouse gasses. Climate alarmists have, in turn, argued that all of 20th century warming, and more, was due to anthropogenic effects (if the “and more” is confusing, it means that some scientists believe that certain man-made and natural cooling effects actually reduced man-made warming below what it might have been.)

It is only in this context that Michael Mann’s famous hockey stick studies make even a bit of sense. After all, what do pre-industrial world temperature trends have anything to tell us about the effect of man-made Co2 on 20th century temperatures?

But Mann’s work had a very specific purpose — to make the case that the natural variability of temperatures, at least on a millennial scale, is very small. Though considered by many to be deeply flawed, Mann’s work seemed to say that the anecdotal historical record was wrong, that there was not a Medieval warm period or very cold period during the solar minima of the 17th and 18th centuries. In his hockey stick, the only significant trend in temperatures began with the industrial age, and man’s production of CO2.

I have resisted, until now, the urge to write about the computer climate models that that dominate much of the global warming discourse. That is because it is almost impossible to discuss these models, and their flaws, without getting too technical or wonky.

But it is increasingly clear that the models are the linchpin of the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming theory. They are not just a piece of the evidence for future catastrophes, they are the only evidence.

How can this be, you say? There are seemingly thousands of studies coming out every week on various aspects of climate. And that is true. But note that I was careful when I focused my assertion around “the catastrophe.”

Plenty of the issues that swirl around the climate debate can be proven without resorting to computer modelling, often from direct observation. We know the climate is changing all the time through history, and we know temperatures rise and fall (and have mostly risen over the last century). We also know that human emitted CO2, all things being equal, can warm the Earth as its atmospheric concentrations rise.

My guess is that most readers have seen the recent 10:10 climate video, in which government teachers and other global warming zealots push red buttons that explode school children and adults who don’t toe the global warming line (if you missed the video, you can watch it here, though beware, there is a lot of, uh, gore.)

Context is important. Had the video been part of a absurdist Monty Python sketch, I probably would have thought it funny. Had the video been produced by skeptics to mock the stridency of the global warming community, it would have been thought to be over-the-top. But this was a video funded by establishment groups, showing those who opposed them being killed in a horrible manner.

After an initial non-apology that basically read, “we’re sorry you have no sense of humor,” folks who are alarmed about global warming have been spinning the video as a fleeting and isolated error in judgment roughly equivalent to a politician’s misstatement in a debate. This doesn’t entirely wash, however — hundreds of people had to be involved in the making of the video over a period of months, from original concept design through post-production. The group involved well-known directors and actors and prominent activists in the 10:10 organization and its partners. The whole effort was underwritten by a number of major corporations as well as the UK government.